The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the inventors hereof, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted to be prior art against the present disclosure.
Gigabit Ethernet allows transmission of Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second (1000 Mb/s). The initial standard for Gigabit Ethernet was introduced by the IEEE as IEEE 802.3Z, which is commonly referred to as 1000BASE-X. 1000BASE-X Ethernet typically is built using an optical fiber infrastructure, or has been used over copper backplanes (i.e. 1000BASE-KX). Advancements in PHY transmission technologies facilitate Ethernet over twisted pair copper wire at a speed of 2.5 Gigabits per second (Gb/s) or 5 Gb/s. The resulting standard for 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet is named 2.5GBASE-X. However, no existing IEEE standard regulating 2.5-Gigabit Ethernet over optical fiber has been published. As a result, 2.5-Gigabit Ethernet over optical fiber is sometimes achieved by speeding up 1000BASE-X Ethernet 2.5 times faster. 2.5GBASE-X Ethernet and 1000BASE-X Ethernet running 2.5 times faster are not necessarily interoperable, as 2.5GBASE-X Ethernet does not necessarily fit an accepted framework that regulates high-speed Ethernet.